All Alive, All Dead: A Review of the First Episodes of the Fourth Season of "Westworld"
In the new season of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's ambitious sci-fi, there are fewer games with time, but it's still difficult to figure out who is human and who is android.
The events of the fourth season of the show take place seven years after the end of the third, and this is already 2065. The series again has several parallel storylines that will definitely intersect closer to the finale. Dolores Abernathy died, now Evan Rachel Wood plays Christina: the girl writes scripts for secondary characters in computer games. Christina's life changes dramatically when a mysterious man starts calling her. As if the past Dolores does not let go of the heroine of identical appearance. After the destruction of the artificial intelligence Rehoboam, Caleb (Aaron Paul) lives with his wife and daughter, works at a construction site, but fears that peace will not last long. The android Maeve (Tandiwe Newton), once the owner of a brothel in an amusement park, who has realized the artificiality of her world, hides in the north from old enemies. Only the Man in Black (Ed Harris), even if it is already a robot, seeks to take over the park's customer database and seize power, and maybe gain immortality.
Due to the pandemic, Westworld fans had to wait over two years for a sequel. The androids (they are also hosts) left the theme park from which the project began at the end of the second season. Perhaps this is where showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy should have stopped.
"Westworld" was loved by the public for the complex and ambiguous philosophical questions that underlie the plot. What makes a person a person? Can an android gain self-awareness and go far beyond the scenario proposed by the creators? What forms the subject's identity? The answers were frightening. The action was in a pleasant balance with the personal dramas of the characters. In addition, the series was distinguished by immersiveness (it was easy to put yourself in the place of a visitor to the park) and the blurring of the line between real life and simulation. And time jumps turned sci-fi into a puzzle and forced to build ingenious theories.
Surprisingly, the expansion of the world did not benefit the project. From the third season, the plot became linear, and new characters replaced the flashbacks and flashforwards. The authors followed a similar scenario and now. The problem is that the series was initially too hermetic, and the viewer was pushed to empathize with the robots that were kept in slavery by people. After the uprising of the machines and the bloodbath, there were no positive characters left at all. By the new season, almost all human heroes have been replaced by hosts with transferred memories of a past life. Androids shoot at androids, no one dies, and the targets of the Man in Black, Maeve, and their henchmen are blurry. Imagine a protracted, two-hour fight between the Hulk and Captain America. The spectacle is fascinating, but endless and quickly boring. No one forcibly keeps the hosts in the park, the artificial intelligence that controlled the world has been destroyed - the creators have to come up with imaginary reasons to continue.
Initially, "Westworld" captivated with a curious genre content: either science fiction, or western, or cyberpunk. Thematic zones dedicated to the samurai, colonial India and the indigenous peoples of America added variety to the events on the screen and allowed for clever change of scenery. In the fourth season, a new park appears - gangster America of the 1930s. Now the robots are dressed up in jackets, trousers and bowler hats and drive around in vintage Rolls-Royces. Cinephiles may be pleased with the allusions to their favorite gangster pictures, but this is just a beautiful cover that does not change the poverty of the content. The simulation of the era is replaced by banal spy showdowns over and over again. For several years now, Maeve and the Man in Black have been in a fierce confrontation. The action in the fourth season is no less than in the third, and philosophical reasoning has long ended. If it weren’t for the backstory of the characters, the series would have confidently slipped into a category B action movie. There are so many fights and shootings that the enemies have already forgotten that they are sharing.
Perhaps Westworld would benefit from self-irony. The creators could have gone off the rails and sarcastically poked fun at their own overly complicated designs, from which Christopher Nolan would scratch his head thoughtfully. But there is still no humor in the series. The HBO project has become hostage to its own popularity: the channel's bosses are renewing Westworld for new seasons, the scriptwriters are writing a sequel, but mechanically, they have nothing to say for a long time. The relationship between humans and machines, or even creator and human, has long been dismantled. Now every season of the project turns into a protracted series of "Black Mirror" with familiar faces. Only low ratings and the closure of the project can help get out of this vicious circle. Otherwise, viewers will continue to hope for a miracle, nostalgic for the first episodes, and then sigh in disappointment that the series is no longer the same.
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